Enchantment

The night before his play opens, a playwright named John Vance Malone encounters something far more dramatic than anything he's written. A mysterious woman in moonlight, a stolen necklace, a duel on a rooftop, a dash through rain-slicked streets of the city he thought he knew. MacGrath spins five interconnected tales where romance and adventure blur into something neither quite real nor entirely fantasy. The prose has the fizzy, improbable charm of early cinema, all shadow and swagger, with characters who speak in witticisms and act on impulses they cannot explain. These are stories that know they're stories, and wear that knowledge like a wink. What begins as a whimsical puzzle becomes a meditation on how we let ourselves be enchanted, on the thin membrane between the life we plan and the life that happens to us. For readers who miss the particular magic of Edwardian adventure, all cigarette smoke and bold gestures and impossible coincidences that somehow feel earned.